“Maybe it really was plasma,” Josh Kennedy suggested.

“Then it isn’t much of a weapon of mass destruction,” Harley said, pointing to the screen. “It looks like the control center is gone, but not much else.” Several windows in the screen were showing other news channels, each with its slightly different title. “Tragedy in Bangalore!” “Strike from Space?”

“Tell that to the Brahma team,” Kennedy said.

“Well, hell, Josh . . . we can tell it to ourselves. How far out?”

“Fifteen minutes,” Buell said. He was starting to annoy Harley.

“We made our choice,” Weldon said. He patted Jasmine Trieu and Travis Buell on the shoulders and talked to the comm team behind them. “Make sure you keep checking their frequencies. Taj and his folks need us now.”

“And we need divine help,” Kennedy said.

Sasha Blaine entered mission control, bringing the entire Home Team with her. “This will be cozy,” Harley said.

“He told us to come.” Blaine nodded toward Shane Weldon.

“I was kidding,” Harley told her. “I’m glad you’re here.”

Weldon was saying, “It puts a few more walls between you and whatever happens outside.”

Williams, Creel, Matulka, and Valdez had at least been confined to the visitors’ area. (Harley wondered if that shiny glass would be transformed into knifelike shards in the next few minutes.) Rachel was standing with Harley and Sasha. “Maybe we should all hold hands,” the girl said.

Blaine was quick to comply, and she made sure Harley couldn’t escape her grasp.

But Harley remained engaged in the operational aspects. He couldn’t help it; he didn’t do emotion and sentiment. “What’s on the networks?” He knew they had covered the Bangalore strike . . . they had surely heard that Houston was next up.

“On screen,” Weldon said. Four different images showed Houston from a variety of angles. There was a shot from an office tower downtown, two from news helicopters (one of them north of the Johnson Space Center), and one from a traffic airplane flying east along I-10.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” Travis Buell said, clearly exasperated. “A cloudy day.” The images were indeed obscured by low clouds. The aircraft shot bobbled as its pilot fought through choppy air.

“You want it sunny when you die, Travis?” Weldon snapped, triggering a wave of hysterical laughter.

Buell didn’t care for the comment. “I just want to see what’s going on!”

“What’s going on,” Harley said, “is that a blob from space is about to whack us. Anything beyond that is just guesswork.”

The young astronaut didn’t care for that response, either. He pushed back, disconnected his headset, and, elbowing his way past another controller, walked out.

“One minute to projected impact,” Jasmine Trieu said.

“You can spare us the countdown, thank you, Jazz,” Shane Weldon told her.

“There it is!” Rachel’s voice.

The fixed camera in downtown Houston had tilted up—there was a bright sphere just like the one that had destroyed Bangalore mission control, falling fast. Weirdly, it was headed away from the camera . . . which was downtown.

But toward JSC.

Harley felt Sasha Blaine’s grip tightening. He reached for Rachel’s hand, looked into her eyes. “Here we go.”

The plasma blob flashed through the other screens, then vanished.

Nothing happened.

Then the whole building shuddered, as if belted with some giant hammer. But only once, and for a fraction of a second. The lights dimmed and the screens flickered. But they, too, stayed on.

After a moment, someone said, “Is that all you got?” But there was no laughter.

Harley looked at Sasha and Rachel. Both of them were wide-eyed, hopeful. Then everyone looked at the television images on the big screen.

Allowing for unsteady mounting—the cameras seemed to be getting buffeted by some kind of shock wave or wind—all showed images much like Bangalore: a small mushroom cloud rising above a landscape.

Weldon was shouting. “Does anybody know where, exactly, that thing hit?”

Kennedy had an answer. “KTRK is saying NASA Parkway in Sea-brook.”

“Can we do better?”

He could. “Look at the KHOU feed.” On the screen a Google Map of the JSC area showed a big fat X to the east of the center itself.

“Did they miss?” Rachel asked, giggling.

“No,” Sasha Blaine said. “They hit the target dead-on.”

Weldon was not a shouter, especially not at people who didn’t work for him. Today was an exception. “What the hell are you talking about?”

Blaine swallowed, like an actress thrust onstage in an unfamiliar play. “Bangalore took a direct hit and was destroyed. Its relay antennae were on its roof.

“Houston’s plasma bomb hit two miles east, at the corner of this facility. Where your antennae are.”

There was silence in mission control. Finally one of the communications operators said, “She’s right. That impact was directly on the antenna farm. We’re in backup mode.”

As the other controllers resumed breathing, and working, Harley turned to Sasha Blaine. “You’re pretty smart for a girl.”

Sasha Blaine kissed him. “I’m just happy we’re still alive!”

Even as Harley pondered the insanity of a personal relationship with Sasha Blaine, especially one conducted in Rachel’s presence, Weldon was once again on task. “Okay, everyone, we have obvious comm problems. Let’s find a workaround. We need to be able to talk to Destiny.”

Then he turned to Harley and Sasha. “If they weren’t trying to destroy us, what the hell was the point?”

Sasha shrugged. Weldon had accepted her completely, a rare honor for someone who had not trained “the MOD way.” “Maybe just to show they could.”

“Well, then, are we supposed to surrender now?”

Harley ceased to listen. He had his eyes on the big screen.

So did Rachel Stewart. “Harley, what’s that?”

One television camera showed a close-up image of the shattered Bangalore mission control center . . . the smoke had cleared and showed what appeared to be the plasma blob from Keanu still intact.

And rotating.

Gabriel Jones and Brent Bynum entered, along with their retinue. “Are you watching this?” Bynum asked.

Jones had regained his equilibrium. Once again, Harley was impressed by the way NASA people allowed sheer professional curiosity to trump personal tragedy. The speculations came quickly. Maybe it was a sample return craft, like one of NASA’s Mars probes. Someone asked, “What if it gets bigger?” Another man wondered if the Object in India was burrowing deeper—

Shane Weldon was shaking his head. “It would disappear, wouldn’t it? If it were trying to burrow into the Earth?”

“And why would it do that?” Harley couldn’t help asking questions, either, though he directed his at Rachel and Sasha.

Sasha was looking at the screens and the news footage. None of the four feeds showed anything but a vapor cloud over the Houston impact site. “Do you suppose our Object is rotating, too?”

“I wish you guys would take this discussion somewhere else,” Josh Kennedy said. “We’ve got a spacecraft to land.”

Live so that thou mayest desire to live again—that is thy duty—for in any case thou wilt live again.

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

Entering the Temple was like entering a cathedral, something Zack had done at Chartres, during his one and only trip to Europe. This alien structure had similarities, at least by Zack’s frazzled standards. For example, here was a nave, a smaller, narrower room that led to the chamber containing the altar. Or was that the transept? For one of the few times in his life, Zack told himself he really should have paid more attention to medieval architecture.